A Shared History of Cancer, a Love of Baseball and a Cubs-Mets Game

She wears it on plane rides for work. She wore it when her mother, Peggy, had major surgery. She left it at a restaurant once and raced back to find it.

“It was just a hat to me until I went through everything,” Wood said. “If there’s one possession I need with me for the rest of my life, it’s this hat.”

Wood’s story struck a chord with Alderson, who quietly dealt with a cancer diagnosis as the Mets swept the Cubs in the 2015 National League Championship Series and then lost the World Series to the Kansas City Royals.

Alderson, 69, is a former Marine, a lawyer and a longtime baseball executive. He has been hesitant to talk often about his own cancer because he does not want it to define him. Yet as he contended with his own diagnosis, he watched Forde deal gracefully and courageously with hers.

Forde spent more than two decades with the Mets. The mother of two children, she managed to stay in her job as the Mets ended a long run of losing seasons and nearly won a championship.

Continue reading the main story

Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ vice president for media relations, was a close friend of Forde’s and said he could not talk her out of going to…